Information technology services company PBT Group focuses on business intelligence (BI) – applications and technologies used to gather, provide access to, and analyse company operations' data and information – to receive and provide information for decision makers on all levels in financial institutions.

"Companies tend to have a lot of information all over the office in different systems that needs to easily accessed. BI brings all this information together into a central area, in a new system, and integrates and stores it for easy access," says PBT Group COO Martin Rennhackkamp.

Business intelligence systems can help companies have a more comprehensive knowledge of the factors affecting their business, such as metrics on sales, production, internal operations, and they can help companies to make better business decisions.

Rennhackkamp explains that in the operational systems of the organisation, data is stored to make transactions easier and faster. However, this is not always the ideal way to store data to access it for information and analysis purposes.

Data that is stored in a BI system, often a data warehouse, can be accessed by any person on any managerial level to analyse the information as well as follow the trends that are being experienced in that particular market sector. "The systems implemented by PBT Group are more exploitation-friendly than previous systems," says Rennhackkamp.

He adds that the different areas within a company can access the information they require in real time, in an integrated manner.

Rennhackkamp notes that BI has become an integral part of business since people are so reliant on information, as well as the need to access that information quickly and easily. "While the system requires daily or weekly updates, it only needs to have the structure for these updates administered once. In this way, if a company is looking to launch a new product aimed at a specific market, the research and data is accessible, saving time by reducing the need to do surveys and other information gathering," he explains.

Where the organisation is made up of a number of groups, the system allows these companies to access information from their individual data warehouses, as well as access group information to view the group trends and risks across the group.

Rennhackkamp says the requirement for such a system has always been needed, but it is only in the past few years that companies are actually implementing systems to access this kind of information.

PBT Group is product independent, so it will use whichever package is already in use in that company and make it work within that system. "A company cannot, however, buy a BI system, install it and expect immediate business benefit. Companies would need to employ the skills of a BI technician to make it work," he states. PBT Group will program the system up in such a way that it will continually and automatically update the information that is implemented into the system.

He notes that an advantage of the BI system is that information is extracted from other systems so that in the case of the system crashing, the information can be re-extracted and therefore none of the information is lost.

Rennhackkamp says that some of the main drivers behind information developments include the new legislation regarding the National Credit Act, which is generating large amounts of work for the financial industry in the information sector.

Other factor being seen in the financial services sector is a high latency in information delivery where the trend should be a drive towards implementing information in real time. "Instead of having an historic view of information, there is a trend towards accessing a real-time view of information," says Rennhackkamp. He adds that banks need to have the information at hand when a customer makes a transaction so that they can act on it when it is required and have a real-time view of that customer's banking history.

Rennhackkamp notes that the main challenge facing the implementation of BI systems is the reluctance by financial institutions to change. He notes that while banks made groundbreaking discoveries in the use of BI systems, they need to implement the lessons that they learned in order to make the system more efficient.

Another challenge that is noticed is that banks spend vast amounts of money maintaining these inefficient systems, instead of redoing the system to create an effective and efficient system that will reduce these costs.

Rennhackkamp says the advantages of newer and more efficient systems are seen when the system is used in an effective and efficient manner. "A lot of this efficiency is about how the data is stored, where it is stored, and how it is accessed," concludes Rennhackkamp.